Bakhtin's Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives

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Bakhtin's Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives literary.chronotope.book Page 3 Tuesday, May 4, 2010 5:47 PM BAKHTIN'S THEORY OF THE LITERARY CHRONOTOPE: REFLECTIONS, APPLICATIONS, PERSPECTIVES Nele Bemong, Pieter Borghart, Michel De Dobbeleer, Kristoffel Demoen, Koen De Temmerman & Bart Keunen (eds.) literary.chronotope.book Page 4 Tuesday, May 4, 2010 5:47 PM © Academia Press Eekhout 2 9000 Gent T. (+32) (0)9 233 80 88 F. (+32) (0)9 233 14 09 [email protected] www.academiapress.be The publications of Academia Press are distributed by: Belgium: J. Story-Scientia nv Wetenschappelijke Boekhandel Sint-Kwintensberg 87 B-9000 Gent T. 09 255 57 57 F. 09 233 14 09 [email protected] www.story.be The Netherlands: Ef & Ef Eind 36 NL-6017 BH Thorn T. 0475 561501 F. 0475 561660 Rest of the world: UPNE, Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA (www.upne.com) Nele Bemong, Pieter Borghart, Michel De Dobbeleer, Kristoffel Demoen, Koen De Temmerman & Bart Keunen (eds.) Bakhtin's Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives Proceedings of the workshop entitled “Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives” (27-28 June 2008) supported by the Royal Flemish Academy for Sciences and the Arts. Gent, Academia Press, 2010, v + 213 pp. ISBN 978 90 382 1563 1 D/2010/4804/84 U 1414 Layout: proxess.be Cover: Steebz/KHUAN No part of this publication may be reproduced in print, by photocopy, microfilm or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. literary.chronotope.book Page i Tuesday, May 4, 2010 5:47 PM I CONTENTS Preface . iii PART I STATE OF THE ART . 1 BAKHTIN’S THEORY OF THE LITERARY CHRONOTOPE: REFLECTIONS, APPLICATIONS, PERSPECTIVES. 3 Nele Bemong & Pieter Borghart PART II PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS . 17 THE FUGUE OF CHRONOTOPE . 19 Michael Holquist THE CHRONOTOPIC IMAGINATION IN LITERATURE AND FILM BAKHTIN, BERGSON AND DELEUZE ON FORMS OF TIME. 35 Bart Keunen PART III THE RELEVANCE OF THE CHRONOTOPE FOR LITERARY HISTORY . 57 HISTORICAL POETICS: CHRONOTOPES IN LEUCIPPE AND CLITOPHON AND TOM JONES . 59 Roderick Beaton EULOGIZING REALISM: DOCUMENTARY CHRONOTOPES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PROSE FICTION . 77 Pieter Borghart & Michel De Dobbeleer PART IV CHRONOTOPICAL READINGS . 91 THE CHRONOTOPE OF HUMANNESS: BAKHTIN AND DOSTOEVSKY . 93 Gary Saul Morson HETEROCHRONIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FALL: BAKHTIN, MILTON, DELILLO . 111 Rachel Falconer literary.chronotope.book Page ii Tuesday, May 4, 2010 5:47 PM II CONTENTS “IT WAS NOT DEATH”: THE POETIC CAREER OF THE CHRONOTOPE . 131 Joy Ladin PART V SOME PERSPECTIVES FOR LITERARY THEORY . 157 INTERNAL CHRONOTOPIC GENRE STRUCTURES: THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY HISTORICAL NOVEL IN THE CONTEXT OF THE BELGIAN LITERARY POLYSYSTEM . 159 Nele Bemong THE CHRONOTOPE AND THE STUDY OF LITERARY ADAPTATION: THE CASE OF ROBINSON CRUSOE . 179 Tara Collington WORKS CITED . 195 ABOUT THE AUTHORS . 211 literary.chronotope.book Page 3 Tuesday, May 4, 2010 5:47 PM 3 Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives Nele Bemong & Pieter Borghart Since western scholars became acquainted with his writings in the 1970s and 1980s, the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin has been an indispensable figure in literary theory and a number of related disciplines in the humanities. It was, however, not for a further decade or so that his concept of the literary chronotope, one of the key notions for understanding Bakhtinian thought on narrative form and evolution, began to receive systematic scholarly attention. Since the conceptual innovation that Bakhtin introduced with this idiosyncratic view of temporal and spatial relationships in narrative could almost be regarded as a new paradigm, albeit a minor one, the explanatory potential of which has by no means been exhausted yet, this attention was certainly appropriate. Initially designed as an analytical instrument for establish- ing generic divisions in the history of the western novel, chronotopic analysis has recently been proposed as a conceptual tool for enriching such diverse fields as nar- ratology (Scholz 2003: 160-5), reception theory (Collington 2006: 91-8), cognitive approaches to literature (Keunen 2000a) and even gender studies (Pearce 1994: 173-95).1 The aim of this introductory article, firstly, is to recapitulate the basic principles of Bakhtin’s initial theory as formulated in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics” (henceforth FTC) and “The Bildungs- roman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historic Typology of the Novel)” (henceforth BSHR). Subsequently, we present some relevant elabora- tions of Bakhtin’s initial concept and a number of applications of chronotopic analysis, closing our state of the art by outlining two perspectives for further investi- gation. Some of the issues which we touch upon receive more detailed treatment in other contributions to this volume. Others may offer perspectives for future Bakhtin scholarship. Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope But wherein exactly lies the conceptual advance offered by the concept of literary chronotopes? Unlike sheer formalist or structuralist approaches to narrative time and space, according to Bakhtin these two categories constitute a fundamental unity, as in the human perception of everyday reality. This “intrinsic connectedness of tem- poral and spatial relationships” denoted by the term “chronotope” (FTC: 84) is tan- tamount to the world construction that is at the base of every narrative text, compris- literary.chronotope.book Page 4 Tuesday, May 4, 2010 5:47 PM 4 PART I–STATE OF THE ART ing a coherent combination of spatial and temporal indicators. The famous passage in FTC in which Bakhtin comes closest to formulating some sort of a definition reads as follows: In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and his- tory. The intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. (ibid.)2 In sum, Bakhtin’s basic assumption is the idea that narrative texts are not only com- posed of a sequence of diegetic events and speech acts, but also – and perhaps even primarily – of the construction of a particular fictional world or chronotope. As Bakhtin himself points out, the epistemological origins for such a conception of narrative time and space can be traced back to both the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant and Albert Einstein’s relativity theory.3 From Kant Bakhtin borrowed the idea that time and space are in essence categories through which human beings perceive and structure the surrounding world, and hence “indispensable forms of cognition” (Morson and Emerson 1990: 367). As these categories in Bakhtin’s view do not con- stitute “transcendental” abstractions but “forms of the most immediate reality” (FTC: 85), earlier commentaries often identified the philosophical component of his theory with a Neo-Kantian view. Bernhard Scholz, however, has convincingly argued that Kant and Bakhtin did not differ in their conceptions of time and space, but rather with regard to their focus of interest. Whereas Kant undertook a scientifically based attempt to gain insight into the universal system of human perception through time and space, Bakhtin was looking for historical evidence of such perceptual activity as manifested in literary texts: Natural science, if I may extend the Kantian image, is the act of designing and coercing nature; literature, as a corpus of texts, presents versions of nature designed and coerced in conformity to certain principles. Litera- ture, as a historical phenomenon, is – like older stages of science – the repository of sedimented designs, of answers given to coercing questions of reason. (Scholz 2003: 155)4 Contemporary developments in mathematics and physics, meanwhile, provided Bakhtin with the strong belief that the nature of spatio-temporal configurations in narrative worlds, although not fully identical with Einsteinian time-space (time as the fourth dimension of space), does share a common ground with the principles of relativity theory. Firstly, as has already been noted, both in physical and fictional worlds there can be observed an intrinsic connectedness of time and space, because in both realms chronology cannot be separated from events and vice versa: “[a]n event”, writes Michael Holquist, “is always a dialogic unit in so far as it is a co- literary.chronotope.book Page 5 Tuesday, May 4, 2010 5:47 PM BAKHTIN’S THEORY OF THE LITERARY CHRONOTOPE: REFLECTIONS, APPLICATIONS, PERSPECTIVES 5 relation: something happens only when something else with which it can be com- pared reveals a change in time and space […]” (2002: 116). A second similarity can be found in the proposition that there exists a variety of senses of time and space. In mathematics, for instance, the alleged universal system of Euclidian geometry all of a sudden lost its monopoly when Lobachevsky developed his multi-dimensional geometry: “[f]or Bakhtin, what is true for geometries of space is also true of chronoto- pes” (Morson and Emerson 1990: 368). As Morson and Emerson have observed, it follows, then, that “[d]ifferent aspects or orders of the universe cannot be supposed to operate with the same chronotope” (ibid.). A representative example from the exact sciences can be found in the divergent rhythms according to which biological
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